Promise
by tastewithouttalent
Summary: "Teshima wakes to the sound of his phone buzzing." Aoyagi sometimes has trouble sleeping, but Teshima is only ever patient with him.


Teshima wakes to the sound of his phone buzzing. He has the ringer turned off by default - it's easier if he doesn't have to remember to turn it on and off - but it still vibrates against the floor, offers a faint hum of sound that reasonably shouldn't be enough to wake him. The fact that it does is, he suspects, due in large part to the prescient suspicion that tells him who's calling well before he's disentangled an arm from his sheets and gotten the phone to his ear.

"Aoyagi," he says, grating the name over the rough-throat of sleep. "What's up?"

There's a sharp inhale on the other end of the line, the sound of worry clear even to Teshima's sleep-hazed brain. He smiles, shuts his eyes and shakes his head, even if Aoyagi can't see the motion of negation.

"It's fine." He rolls over onto his back, stifles a half-formed yawn as he moves. "I don't mind waking up for you." Then, quick, before Aoyagi can worry himself into another apology: "Can't sleep again?"

A hum in response, a low vibration of sound that reminds Teshima of the buzz of his phone against the floor, quiet but no less clear than a louder noise would be. He smiles again, lets his shoulders relax against the soft of his bed while he takes a breath, his inhale falling into time with the sound of Aoyagi's breathing on the other edge of the phone.

"Want me to talk to you?" Teshima asks, modulating his voice into the soft almost-whisper he knows Aoyagi likes late at night. It suits the dark of his quiet room, fits itself to the sigh of affirmative Aoyagi offers, until even Teshima's laugh of response is gentler than it would normally be, more a huff of air than anything better formed.

"Okay," he says, angles his free hand up to stretch over his head; the tension is satisfying, unwinding comfort into his body, and when he relaxes it's with a sigh of pleasure. "This will be easier when you don't have to call me, you know." He can hear the way Aoyagi's breathing catches on the other end of the line, the pause between inhales speaking to his appreciation of this topic, as if Teshima needed the reassurance, as if this isn't Teshima's favorite subject too.

"I bet you'll sleep just fine once we move in together," he says now, the shape of the fantasy blossoming into color behind his shut eyes. "We'll have a tiny little apartment, with a kitchen barely big enough for us both and a window box with flowers."

Aoyagi makes a sound, a tiny huff of an exhale, and Teshima grins into the dark, amusement coming easy. "I won't touch them," he promises. He knows better by now than to inflict his own decidedly-not-green thumb on any kind of growing thing. "But you can grow flowers, or herbs, maybe. And we can cook together every night." Everything is spreading out in Teshima's imagination, the cramped space of a cheap apartment made charming by the possibility of bumping into Aoyagi around every corner, the limited floor space all the more reason to press together on a single futon.

"I could give you a massage, if you were having trouble sleeping," Teshima goes on, feeling the imagined shift of warm skin under his palms, seeing the shift of golden eyelashes against insomnia-heavy shadows. "Or we could just lie in bed together, like we are now, except that we wouldn't have to be on the phone, I'd be close enough that I could kiss you whenever I started getting sleepy."

That earns him a laugh, or the closest thing to it Aoyagi ever gives, a sudden huff of air that crackles static over the line. Teshima laughs aloud for the both of them, self-deprecation turning the sound sharp on his tongue.

"I'd _eventually_ get to sleep," he protests weakly, because Aoyagi's right; the odds of them going straight to sleep when they're close enough to touch are vanishingly low. "It'd be worth it to be able to touch you."

There's a pause, the line quiet except for the sigh Aoyagi heaves, the pattern of Teshima's breathing coming a little faster with more emotion than he had intended. He opens his eyes, stares into the too-quiet darkness of his lonely room as all his attention focuses in on the sound of his other half breathing against a phone receiver.

"We won't ever be apart," he says, soft and careful with the words, because they're a promise and not just a daydream.

Aoyagi hums agreement, the sound clear enough even someone not Teshima could understand it, and Teshima smiles again, even if it doesn't completely undo the knot in his chest.

"Yeah," he says. "Together."

There's another beat of silence, both of them staring unseeing into the dark of their respective rooms, both of their thoughts fitting into the same course until Teshima knows what Aoyagi is going to say, knows when he's going to say it, can speak in the gap before Aoyagi even takes a breath for words.

"A lullaby, right?" He's grinning, now, turning over onto his side again and shifting to a more comfortable angle. "Alright. Are you ready?" Aoyagi offers another hum, a wordless sound of accord, and Teshima smiles, shuts his eyes, and picks up the tune, humming soft in the back of his throat so it comes out as more a suggestion of notes than any sound loud enough to startle sleep away. Aoyagi goes silent on the other end of the line, only the even pace of his breathing to speak to his continued attention, and by the time Teshima lets the sound trail off into quiet he can hear the pace of the other's inhales sliding soft and heavy with sleep.

He doesn't say anything. The quiet is enough, with the rhythm of Aoyagi's breathing to guide his own. Teshima takes a deep breath instead, lets it out as a sigh, and when he hears Aoyagi's faint huff of amusement he's already drifting towards sleep with the comfort of the phone to lull him.


End file.
